1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a report generation support apparatus that generates a medical imaging report for reporting the result of interpretation of a medical image, a report generation support system, and a medical image referring apparatus. More specifically, the present invention relates to a report generation support technique of generating a link of a medical image corresponding to a link destination such as a string in a comment field of a medical imaging report.
2. Description of the Related Art
Since medical practice is segmentalized into specialized fields, interpretation of a medical image captured by a conventional image diagnosis apparatus is generally asked to a radiologist. A radiologist displays a medical image that the radiologist is asked to interpret on a monitor, and writes a medical imaging report on the interpretation result.
Moreover, at the time of interpretation, a radiologist displays a medical image for comparison with an interpretation object, or displays a previous medical imaging report of the patient or a medical imaging report on the result of interpretation of a comparison medical image, and uses them as reference materials.
In recent years, it has become common to display a report generation screen on a monitor to electronically generate a medical imaging report. In a report generation support apparatus, an operator inputs a comment about a medical image to be interpreted into a comment field.
Then, regarding an image indicated in the comment, the operator specifies a link corresponding range with respect to a string already inputted into the comment field, and executes linking to the string therein. Alternatively, there is a case that a report to be a link destination other than the string is designated and the image is directly linked to the corresponding report.
Furthermore, in linking of a medical image to a link object such as a string, the operator designates a medical image to be linked, drags from the medical image, and drops the medical image onto a link object of a link destination. By this drag-and-drop operation, address information indicating a storing place of the designated medical image is linked to the link object on which the medical image has been dropped.
In a case that the link destination is a string, by changing the color of the link destination string and underlining it simultaneously with the linking, the string is identified. Such a linking technique by the drag-and-drop operation is proposed (e.g., Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2005-301453).
Owing to the medical imaging report generation technique by linking, the efficiency in interpretation has increased.
However, in a case that a link is merely put to an image as in JP-A 2005-301453, it is difficult to grasp what part in a medical image is indicated by the content of a comment field at a glance. Accordingly, in order to make it possible to grasp what part in a medical image is indicated by the content of a comment field, the operator needs to manually attach, to the medical image, an annotation such as an arrow that indicates the part in the medical image indicated by the content of the comment field.
Further, comments written in the comment field may indicate various different parts in one sheet of medical image. In this case, it is difficult, by merely attaching a plurality of annotations to the medical image, to grasp the correspondence relation between the comments in the comment field and the annotations. Accordingly, the operator needs to display the correspondence relation by, e.g., manually attaching the same signs to a comment in the comment field and to an annotation in the medical image corresponding to the content. Such a method of manually generating annotations and generating signs that represent the correspondence relation lowers the operation efficiency because much time is spent for generation of the annotations and signs.